The Cities We Need

The concept of “place work” might not be familiar to most urban planners, but it’s a critical element of city life that deserves our attention. In a fascinating conversation on the Booked On Planning podcast, author Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani discusses her book “The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places,” offering insights into how everyday spaces shape our communities and individual identities.

Bendiner-Viani’s work spans decades and began with a simple question: what places matter to people in their neighborhoods? Rather than photographing neighborhoods from her perspective alone, she invited residents to give her tours, showing her the places that held meaning for them. This approach revealed something powerful—that places we might overlook as outsiders often contain rich histories and social significance for community members. The project, which began to take shape on September 11, 2001, took on additional meaning as she witnessed how everyday places helped people feel connected during times of crisis.

The comparative approach between two neighborhoods—Mosswood in Oakland and Prospect Heights in Brooklyn—provides a fascinating lens through which to examine place attachment. By fluidly moving between stories from both cities throughout her book, Bendiner-Viani demonstrates that despite different contexts, the human need for connection through everyday places transcends geographic boundaries. Both neighborhoods share histories of being “intermediary spaces” with diverse populations, where residents valued “mixedness” as part of their identity. This approach helps readers see patterns in how people connect to places across very different urban environments.

Perhaps the most touching story shared during the podcast was about an electronics store in Brooklyn where the owner had passed away, but his cricket-playing friends still gathered every Thursday afternoon around a table in the back. The store remained untouched, with merchandise still on shelves, becoming an informal memorial and gathering space. This poignant example perfectly illustrates what’s at stake when we fail to recognize the importance of place work—the social and emotional labor that physical spaces perform in our communities. When planners see only a “redevelopment opportunity” in a boarded-up storefront, they may miss the vital community function it may continue to serve.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought the importance of place work into sharp focus for many people, even if they didn’t have a name for it. As Bendiner-Viani notes, being isolated at home made many realize they missed not just close friends and family, but also the casual encounters with people whose names they didn’t even know. These seemingly insignificant interactions—chatting with baristas, nodding to neighbors, brief conversations with shop owners—form the foundation of community connection. The pandemic helped her articulate why her decades of research mattered: these everyday places are doing essential work for our collective humanity.

Small talk emerges as a surprisingly powerful tool for community building in Bendiner-Viani’s analysis. These casual conversations might seem meaningless, but they serve crucial functions: affirming our shared humanity, building interpersonal trust, and providing low-stakes practice for the higher-stakes conversations society needs to have about democracy, climate change, and other pressing issues. Without places to practice these interactions, our capacity for collective problem-solving diminishes.

The implications for urban planning are profound. If we want to create truly sustainable, resilient communities, we must recognize that the value of a place isn’t just in its physical structures or economic productivity, but in the social connections it enables. As we face pressures of gentrification and redevelopment, preserving community spaces requires asking not just “what is here?” but “what work is this place doing for people?”

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